It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for her, that made him absent-minded at the Wartrace Hall dinner-table that evening; and the father, looking on, suspected that Evan's taciturnity was an expression of his prejudice against the woman who had taken his mother's place. After dinner, when the son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his room, the senator's suspicion became a belief. "You'll have to be right patient with the boy, little woman," he said to the small person whom Gantry had described as the court of last resort; this when Evan had disappeared and the long-stemmed pipe was alight. "I shouldn't wonder if Boston had put some mighty queer notions into his head." The little lady looked up from her embroidery frame and a quaint smile was twitching at the corners of the pretty mouth. "He is a dear boy, and he is trying awfully hard to hate me," she said. "But I sha'n't let him, David." VI ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS From the time when it was heralded in the mammoth New Year's edition of _The Plainsman_ as "the newest, the finest, and the most luxurious hostelry west of the Missouri River," the Inter-Mountain Hotel, in the Sage-brush capital, had been the acceptable gathering-place of the clans, industrial, promoting, or political. Anticipating this patronage, Clarkson, its bonanza-king builder and owner, had amended the architect's plans to make them include a convention-hall, committee-rooms, and a complete floor of suites with private dining-rooms. Past this, the amended plans doubled the floor space of the lobby--debating-ground dear to the heart of the country delegate--and particular pains had been taken to make this semi-public forum, where the burning question of the moment could be caucussed and the shaky partisan resworn to fealty, attractive and home-like; the plainly tiled floor, leather-covered lounging-chairs, and numerous and convenient cuspidors lending an air of democratic comfort which was somehow missing in the resplendent, bemirrored, onyx-plated bar, blazing with its cut glass and polished mahogany. After the solid costliness of Wartrace Hall and the thirty-mile spin in a high-powered gentleman's roadster, which was only one of the three high-priced motor-carriages in the Wartrace garage, Evan Blount was not surprised to learn that his father was registered in permanence for one of the private dining-room suites at the Inter-Mountain. It was amply evident that the simple life which had been the rule of the "Circle-Bar" ranch household had become a thing of the past; and though he charged the new order of things to the ambition of his father's wife, he could hardly cavil at it, since he was himself a sharer in the comforts and luxuries.